I view their failure to put users first as a giant opportunity for someone else to come along and do a better job.
This is very much what the local first movement is about: https://localfirstweb.dev/ Give users control of their data and privacy, moving away from large backend infrastructure, and providing better value to the user. With the bonus of having a more enjoyable development environment and an excited community.
I never left... still creating desktop applications in my spare time :-).
I'm still coming up to speed on downvoting. The down arrows appeared for me suddenly a couple of weeks ago but not for every post. At least for now I find them useful. I have read a lot of grayed posts to get a feeling for what's going on and usually see why. I've upvoted a few where I thought the author was on point.
One quirk about HN is that if you complain about the downvotes, you'll get even more. The community does seem to treat karma as the truly imaginary internet points they are.
Descendance into the underworld occurs when the goal becomes to embrace the highest negative score as it will put the comment at the bottom extreme of the thread and neither get lost in the middle nor marked at the top of the groupthink. If down votes were to serve the purpose of hiding less useful comments, then it would be more appropriate to style the comments with colors associated with a light/dark theme and not mess with chronological order, but that would likely set off the anti-gay crowd. As an aside, the temperature is more constant further from searing gazes. Just don't get flagged as that calls the terminator hounds.
I'm still coming up to speed on downvoting. The down arrows appeared for me suddenly a couple of weeks ago but not for every post. At least for now I find them useful. I have read a lot of grayed posts to get a feeling for what's going on and usually see why. I've upvoted a few where I thought the author was on point.
One quirk about HN is that if you complain about the downvotes, you'll get even more. The community does seem to treat karma as the truly imaginary internet points they are.
Complaining about voting is explicitly against the community guidelines